In a recent article for Quillette, Colin Wright argued that left-wing scientific denialism poses a greater threat to academic freedom than right-wing scientific denialism. In the past, evolutionary biologists could dispute the claims of creationists and advocates of Intelligent Design without jeopardizing their careers. But the same cannot be said of scientists who publicly dissent from progressive dogma when it comes to, say, the biology of group differences.

The reason, according to Wright, is because the Christian Evangelicals who denied the basic principles of evolutionary biology held no power in academia, while their secular equivalents are often professors, department chairs, deans, administrators, college presidents, journal editors, and so on. Indeed, the new denialist orthodoxy when it comes to biological sex - that it is "assigned" at birth, rather than observed and recorded - is now the official view of the scientific establishment, having been embraced by Scientific American and Nature.As Jordan Peterson wrote in The National Post two years ago: "Look out evolutionary biologists. The PC police are coming for you."

This new, feature-length documentary, funded by Kickstarter and available on Amazon Prime, painstakingly recycles the most hysterical, left-wing arguments against genetics and, in particular, those who've sought to apply genetic research to understanding behavioral and psychological differences. As Jerry Coyne pointed out in a recent blog post, it's this aspect of evolutionary biology that is most frequently attacked by progressive creationists. "One would think that Steve Pinker's book The Blank Slate would have dispelled this kind of blank-slateism, but it hasn't," he writes. "In fact, with the rise of the Offense Culture, the Left's attacks on science have become more intense. Expect more of them."

A Dangerous Idea rounds up all the usual suspects, from James Watson and Francis Crick to Arthur Jensen and Charles Murray, and subjects them to what amounts to a show trial. They are all "biological determinists," in the words of the documentary's narrator, which makes them guilty by association of some of the worst crimes of the 20th century, including the Nazis' extermination of six million Jews and the forced sterilization programs of 31 U.S. states. Not only that, but the very notion that DNA provides a genetic blueprint for life - not just human beings, but any living organism - is based on "pseudoscience." That's right, Crick and Watson, who jointly won the Nobel Prize in Medicine for the discovery of the Double Helix, aren't real scientists, according to this documentary. "DNA does not determine our physical traits," intones the narrator about two-thirds of the way through. Apparently, the very concept of a gene is "a figment of our collective imagination." The film includes interviews with some of the "dangerous" scientists responsible for these fictions, including James Watson, creating the impression that they were given a chance to respond to the charges laid at their feet and had nothing to say. In fact, this is all bought-in footage, and very carefully edited.

As with the editorials in Scientific American and Nature, A Dangerous Idea does its best to give the imprimatur of scientific respectability to its progressive creationism, enlisting a series of men (and women) in white coats to debunk the "gene myth." The first witness for the prosecution is Richard Lewontin, the Marxist biologist who led the witch-hunt against E.O. Wilson in the 1970s. He enthusiastically trots out the objection to Wilson and others in this field that he's been making for 50 years, namely, that any description of what is, when it comes to the genetic influence on human behavior, is a prescription for what ought to be.

"That's a very important justifying ideology," he says, responding to the idea that certain key psychological traits, such as aggressiveness, are heritable -

If you believe that all these characteristics are first of all universal and secondly that they're in the genes, then you would be forced to say we must have society as it is now. So it destroys any question of political morality to change things and it also destroys any claim that we could change things, so it has tremendous importance.

A first year philosophy student would recognize this as the naturalistic fallacy, but no one involved in A Dangerous Idea challenges this faulty reasoning. On the contrary, it forms one of the central planks of its argument against genetic research, the other being that it's "pseudoscience." We're told again and again that anyone who maintains that human behavior is genetically influenced and not entirely the product of the environment - and this is always presented as a binary choice - is an apologist for racial and sexual inequality. This is the "dangerous idea" of the title. According to the narrator, it has been responsible for some of the darkest episodes in the history of mankind. "Biological determinism didn't begin with genetics," intones the voiceover as we're shown an old poster for a slave auction:

Rulers throughout history claimed their divine right to wield power over others was hereditary, based in their noble blood. Even though the United States was the first modern republic to reject aristocracy based on biology, soon after the nation's founding craniometry was being used to defend the enslavement of Africans and the genocide of Native Americans.

Stephen Jay Gould

This reference to "craniometry" is a cue to regurgitate the thesis of Stephen Jay Gould's The Mismeasure of Man (1981) in which the Harvard paleontologist rubbished the work of Samuel George Morton, the 19th Century physician who measured human skulls and found that Caucasians had a larger cranial capacity than any other race. Gould claimed that Morton distorted his data to fit his political preconceptions and held up his research as a cautionary tale of how unconscious bias can lead to bad science. The makers of the documentary either aren't aware - or, worse, chose to ignore the fact - that Gould's critique was itself skewed by ideological bias.

In a 2011 paper published in PLOS, a team of researchers led by Jason Lewis described how they'd remeasured Morton's skulls and found his data to be accurate. They also forensically examined Gould's allegations against Morton, such as the claim that he'd left out data that contradicted his conclusions, and discovered that, for the most part, they were just plain wrong. They don't flat out accuse Gould of fraud, but it's hard to escape that conclusion, given how comprehensively he misrepresented Morton's work. (For another example of Gould misrepresenting the work of a "race scientist," see here.)

I'm not defending Morton's conclusions, incidentally, just pointing out that Gould's critique of his work is flawed. Why did Gould risk his own reputation in order to discredit Morton's? Presumably because he feared that if Morton's research was accepted as accurate it would undermine the case for racial equality. Again, this is faulty reasoning, only this time it's the moralistic fallacy, a close cousin of the naturalistic fallacy. This is the assumption that some aspect of nature cannot be true, or allowed to be widely thought of as true, because that would lead to socially undesirable consequences. This twisted logic runs through A Dangerous Idea like a stick of rock. In addition to endorsing Gould's dismissal of Morton, the film pours scorn on the idea that women's brains are, on average, smaller than men's, and gives this as another example of "pseudoscience." In fact, the largest single-sample study of structural and functional sex differences in the human brain ever undertaken, involving over 5,000 participants, found that, on average, the total brain volume of women is smaller than that of men, even after adjusting for men's larger average body size. Does this undermine the case for gender equality? Of course not.

The mistake this documentary makes is one that's made again and again by opponents of sociobiology, evolutionary psychology, behavioral genetics, sociogenomics, and so on, which is to assume that any explanation of behavioral or psychological differences that appeals to biology is a right-wing attempt to justify inequality - a form of Social Darwinism. And by "inequality" these critics don't just mean inequality of outcome, but the withholding of equal rights from women and minorities. By conflating these two types of inequality, they can point to the difficulties that research findings in these fields create for hardline egalitarians and claim they also present a difficulty for advocates of equal rights. So anyone who believes in equality of any kind, not just end-state equality, has a moral duty to attack these research fields. But, as Steven Pinker points out:

Equality is not the empirical claim that all groups of humans are interchangeable; it is the moral principle that individuals should not be judged or constrained by the average properties of their group.

It's such an elementary mistake, it's slightly baffling as to why it's made so often by those on the Left, not just the makers of this documentary. Do they think: We know that equal rights under the law aren't contingent on the blank slate hypothesis, and we realize that thinking they are is to commit a logical fallacy. But ordinary mortals are too stupid to grasp this point. Those troglodytes out there in red state America would seize on any research evidence showing that behavioral and psychological differences are affected by our genes to justify their bigotry and prejudice. So it's our duty, as the moral guardians of various victim groups, to expel from the public square anyone daring to challenge blank slate orthodoxy and dismiss their research as "racist pseudoscience."

Or do they genuinely think that equal rights are contingent on environmental determinism? Not just politically, because it's easier to persuade people to embrace equal rights if they believe humans are born as blank slates, but logically? Are they the stupid ones?

Whatever the explanation, the energy the Social Justice Left devotes to denying basic scientific truths puts the persecutors of Galileo to shame. There's a particularly feeble section in A Dangerous Idea in which all the arguments against the validity of IQ tests are rehashed, as if no one's told the filmmakers that the existence of a general intelligence quotient, and its correlation with various real-world outcomes, such as socio-economic status, health and longevity, is one of the most robust findings in all of psychology. A psychotherapist called Jay Joseph is wheeled out, author of a book called The Trouble with Twin Studies: A Reassessment of Twin Research in the Social and Behavioral Sciences (2016), to rubbish the evidence from twin and adoption studies. He argues that the reason identical twins raised together are more similar psychologically than fraternal twins raised together is not because they share more genes - genes are a figment of our imagination, after all - but because their greater physical similarity means they're treated less differently by their parents than fraternal twins. But what about the same finding when it comes to identical and fraternal twins reared apart? Why are the former more similar when it comes to a whole range of personality traits, including IQ, than the latter, given that they've been separated at birth? Joseph isn't asked to address that point. (For a comprehensive rebuttal of the arguments in Jay Joseph's book, see this review by Julien Delhez.)

About a third of A Dangerous Idea consists of a history lesson, in which we're repeatedly told that evil men in the past have appealed to genetics to justify their white privilege and perpetrate human rights abuses, including genocide. But the fact that hereditarianism has been used as an excuse by bad actors to do terrible things doesn't discredit the entire hereditarian tradition, as the makers of this documentary seem to think. That's another fallacy - ad hominem. You might as well argue that the crimes against humanity committed by Mao Tse-tung and Pol Pot in the belief that human beings are pieces of clay that can be molded into good Communist citizens completely discredits the filmmaker's blank slate philosophy. And, of course, there's nary a mention of the fact that eugenics was far more popular with the progressive Left than it was with the Right at the beginning of the 20th Century. If we're to regard present-day conservatives with suspicion because their philosophical forebears were in favor of eugenics, shouldn't we regard present-day progressives as suspicious for the same reason?

The intellectual paucity of A Dangerous Idea wouldn't matter if we were living in normal times. But there's a risk it may be shown by progressive zealots on campus to whip up opposition to visiting speakers or members of the biology faculty. The most egregious section in the film is an interview with Van Jones, an African-American activist and CNN contributor, about Charles Murray.

First, the narrator summarizes the thesis of The Bell Curve (1994): "Most controversial was Murray's claim that black people and Latinos are less intelligent on average than whites and that this explained unequal social outcomes." Actually, the claim that blacks and Latinos score lower on IQ tests on average than whites - the claim that Murray and Herrnstein make - isn't remotely "controversial." It is an incontestable fact. Even Murray's most ardent critics acknowledge that. The controversial bit is when Murray and Herrnstein discuss various different explanations for this discrepancy. Nevertheless, Van Jones then pops up to denounce Murray as if pointing out this fact makes him an out-and-out racist:

I thought we had killed this kind of stuff off and here it comes back out of the grave dressed up in scientific garb, but the last time we saw it, it was wearing a Klan robe and it's the same set of ideas.

Van is effectively ordering students to no-platform Murray next time he's booked to appear on their campus - he's virtually a Klansman, right? - and, sure enough, we're then shown footage of students doing precisely that at Middlebury College last year. Needless to say, there's no mention of the fact that when Allison Stanger, a politics professor at Middlebury, tried to get between Murray and the protestors she ended up in the emergency room.

The other risk, if this propaganda is allowed to go unchecked, is to members of the biology faculty. I don't just mean they may be driven off campus, as Brett Weinstein was at Evergreen. Rather, they simply won't be able to do their jobs - which is to teach science. That's been the experience of Luana Moroja, the chair of the biochemistry program at Williams College. She wrote to Jerry Coyne about how bad things have become:

Many professors at Williams have been feeling the walls closing in. I'm an evolutionary biologist, and in my classes there is increasing resistance to learning about heritability (probably fear of the "bell curve", something I actually dismiss by contrasting Brazilian with Americans, as I am from Brazil) and even kin selection! (Using the "naturalistic fallacy" argument, students assume that by teaching kin selection I am somehow endorsing Trump hiring his family.) The word "pregnant woman" is out: only "pregnant human" should be now used (after all, what if the pregnant individual goes by another pronoun?). In other fields the walls have closed in even more.

I'm not arguing that "A Dangerous Idea" shouldn't be shown on campus because it may endanger evolutionary biology professors. That would be to invoke the same argument against free speech that the documentary makes. Nevertheless, everyone associated with this crude piece of scientific illiteracy should be ashamed of themselves - including Robert Reich, the former Democratic Labor Secretary, who is interviewed throughout. They are the progressive equivalent of anti-Vaxxers.

Toby Young is the associate editor of Quillette.

Comment: Much like the creationists on the right, the leftist attack on biological science is completely without merit. You can't deny reality simply because you fear how people may interpret and use the information. It's essentially making the choice to live in a fantasy world, entirely constructed to keep out any uncomfortable truths. Any individual not at least attempting to look at reality objectively is essentially doomed.

Reader Comments

Evolution is not "biological science". There is nothing like an experiment double blind and random that proves it. It is even hard to find a new species that you can formally say did not exist centuries ago.

You can say that you cant deny reality - but saying different to what we think or thinking different than what we do - reveals a denial of reality in the mind of the asserter of something 'else' - be that a biased distortion or an inverted causality or a made up diversionary distraction.

When I see this kind of article and the world it comments on, I see the fragmentation of a mind in conflict with itself - which is the operator or device of mind-as-denial or mind as a blocked channel of communication.

I don't see any of the labels as holding meaning outside the reactive engagement in personalising and seeking reinforcement for the personal masking as a social reinforcement for denial, which works the same for the 'self-group' as for the 'other group', in framing a conflict in terms that break communication and make it impossible.

Objective reality takes meaning from subjective reality - which gives and takes meaning as the subjection of its imaged or symboled reality to judgements - or assigned associated meanings.

The ability to give and take meanings that are not implicit, is creative imagination. Implicit meaning rests in itself and shines of itself as the nature of being. This is to say it is unconflicted, edgeless or uncontained and therefore whole as the unconditional giving of being to all that is - including the experiencing of conditional 'meanings' that are partial, limited and specific to a personal sense of minding or identity investment - like a choice that becomes a path becomes a neural circuit becomes a framework of conditioned response becomes the world experienced.

As created being, reality is undeniable - because even the idea of denying has to relate to something. And the fact of not looking at or beholding is revealing that we know where to not look by holding to something else or to a partiality as IF it were the whole.

As creator beings, we give reality to extend, share and complete it - as the nature of love or creation. This is the nature of reality un-interfered with. To give and receive as one. Giving in accord with who we are is to abide in a clear receptive, but to give different than what we are is to split our mind and be-live it. That is to say to open a conflicted and conflicting dissonance within our mind and project or extend it as our gift to 'share' as a drive to completion that cannot complete, because dissonance as conflict is the condition of a non-receptive or blocked channel of communication.

The ability or willingness to persist in the negatively defined self-reality is in part a mind-trap of framing in reactive identities of shifting fears, projected out and so attacked or denied as the act of hate placed on the devotions of the heart - as a salvatory protector from the 'enemy of love' who is part of our life masked in un-recognised self-denial.

Mind inherently is the freedom to think without limit because it is a gift of the Unlimited to Itself. But in accepting any thought as our own, we then follow the line of such thinking as its natural or logical unfolding of idea and experience. In other words we open and enter relationships of giving and receiving. For what we open to and align in as our self-creative experience is inherently an expression of freedom - even when its idea is a split of mind under coercion and subjection or conflict. The capacity to become seemingly entrapped in our own 'bubble reality' is noticable in any attention TO thought that suddenly wakes to notice it was identified IN the frame of the thinking.

The attempt to break out of subjection is of course the persistence of subjecting. But within its moment it seems to be the movement towards freedom, towards justice, towards completion or fulfilment. And it takes its self-justification from opposition or from a sense of lack seen as a sense of being denied or deprived by the other.

If you can live what you believe then its status as reality will not be questioned. When dissonance of what you be-live and what is, rises, you will define it in terms that support your belief - while you still believe it as your reality.

Only the opening of a perspective upon the belief as idea-accepted and lived allows choice or freedom outside the dictate of the idea.

T he packaging of idea in terms of old and ongoing identity conflicts is framing them for insolubility - as a justification for interjecting time and process between what is - and what you 'wanted' or accepted to be the idea of. The willingness to persist in pain or meaninglessness is always because some element is yet identified meaningful or worthy. And so the attempt to find or make meaning within a frame of impossibility or futility is not recognized as such.

Letting go of what we thought we wanted is the 'dont know' mind or the resting of the use of the mind as the dictator of reality. The release of the bubble - if only a moment is an opening to the communication of the whole - that manifests as being you - as an already wholeness of being you in your relation with all. What is in true movement does not require coercion to move, or guilt to manipulate, or fear to impel. What you can truly rest in the being of seeks no justification or apology for being - but is who you meet and are met in - as a more truly aligned quality of relationship than a self assertive projection or rejection of an identity form.

Creation is instant because time is in the unfolding or working out, sharing and exploration of the created. This instant now is the closest that time can come to 'always' and so now is where we recognize and conserve what we truly are by extending its qualities, and now is the recognition of the movement of being that is always becoming new - and in that sense progressive relative to the expansion of the creative consciousness - but not as a reactive polarity to a fear of regressive and suppressive 'order', but rather as the free release of a mis-take as an opening to a fresh take. Always from now - and always with all that is within this created 'now'. Whatever is, is, and what we alight in and share is ours to share as we know in the sharing. Creating by denial and blocking-mind is like covering over so much of what is, that only a tiny part seems to hold itself apart - and struggle to be against all odds. When an idea no longer serves, it falls away or seems to disintegrate as a workable or usable reality. The unstated term is who or what it serves - and her as always is the choice of who or what you are the servant of. Because we do not create Reality - but extend its purpose - howsoever we may believe otherwise.